Coroner Graham Hetrick says the dead are telling him America's in big trouble

Dauphin County Coroner Graham Hetrick likes to say he speaks for the dead, but what the dead have been telling him lately has dark implications for America's future.

"Boy, we are in big trouble," Hetrick says from his skull-bedecked office in the county forensic facility in Swatara Township.

"We have interns going through here all the time, and I say, 'hold on to your hats because you are going to see the demise of western civilization.' "

Then Hetrick pulls back a sheet, illuminating for his wide-eyed forensic students all the ways Americans are killing themselves: The violence. The suicides. The overdoses. The blown-out livers. The shriveled kidneys. The burned-up pancreases.

So many, he now brings stools into the autopsy room when fresh-faced students are about to meet the many faces of death for the first time. There's also a paper bag for hyperventilating interns to breathe into.

Yet, it's not just the newbies affected by all the carnage so many bring upon themselves. Even Hetrick, who's been the county coroner now for 28 years and has been around death all of his 72 years, still can manage to be stunned by the senselessness of it all.

Case in point is the young, full-term mother-to-be who threw it all away for a heroin needle.

Hetrick is judicious doling out details of the case, so as not to reveal the woman's identity and embarrass the family. But he shares a gruesome glimpse into the autopsy suite that has seen so much, but nothing ever like this:

There were eight cases that day. Both Hetrick and the county's contracted pathologist, Dr. Wayne Ross, had bodies on the autopsy room's two stainless steel tables. Some of the cases involved criminal investigations, so the room was packed with police as well.

Dr. Ross was about to begin the postmortem on the pregnant mother. First, he would have to preform a posthumous cesarean section in order to deliver her full-term baby.

As he did so, the pathologist raised the child in his bloodied, gloved hands, reaching to place the baby into the hanging cradle of a medical scale.

In that moment, with the infant raised high, so blue under the harsh lights and forever mute in death, the chaotic room fell silent.

In that instant, Hetrick glanced up, seeing the faces of people so familiar with death looking in true sorrow at that baby who'd never get the chance to even cry.

And if it were to have a title, perhaps it would be, "The Birth of Death."

It haunts Hetrick to this day. Most of all because of what it says about humanity when a mother would sacrifice the most basic instinct of creating new life for a heroin high.

"Look at us," Hetrick says from behind his signature round-rimmed glasses. "Look what the dead are telling me. The dead are telling me we have a structural issue within our society. Why are the richest and the freest people in all of history deciding to kill themselves and destroy themselves?"

It's not just the drugs, the guns, the beatings and the stabbings, though Hetrick sees more than his share.

It's the suicides, which have risen nearly a third in just the time Hetrick has been coroner. It's the Type-2 diabetics, so morbidly obese that all of Hetrick's gurneys and cots must support at least 500 pounds. It's the 20-something meth addicts who on his table look as if they are in their 60s. It's the young people with livers fatally shot through with fat. It's all the drunks whose thirst could only be quenched in death.

"I see the aftermath," Hetrick says. "It's like going through a city in a war after it's been bombed. It was bombed for all different reasons. I can see that destruction. I'm walking by all the bombarded buildings. And they're called the pancreas and the lungs and the liver."

The solution - indeed, America's salvation - isn't a pill, Hetrick says. It isn't a government program or a fad diet. It's not rehab or a methadone clinic.

Instead, the answer is downright metaphysical, he says. It exists in replacing the material, with the spiritual. The mortal, with the immortal. The pursuit of happiness, with the quest for meaning. The negative, with the positive.

"I believe everything we do is connected to everything else in the universe," says Hetrick, who is deeply read, widely traveled, has studied most all religions and who's also has been an atheist and an agnostic along the way.

He calculates that the last two centuries of wars, atrocities and genocides has resulted in a staggering 200 million violent deaths.

"This is negative energy," Hetrick says. "I've walked into [crime] scenes and felt the evil, just felt it. It makes the hair on the back of your head raise up. And it doesn't come out of the universe. It is transforming the universe. We need to change the energy."

For example, Hetrick says the key to battling the opioid epidemic is treating the underlying emotional trauma, anxiety and lack of resiliency that's driving people's addictions.

"I'm very [19]60s," Hetrick says. "It's all about the love. We've got to help the people, and we've got to love them."

Above all, we must find meaning in life.

"We have lost meaning," Hetrick insists. "We have to get back to that. If you look for happiness, it is so fleeting -- unless you have a 70-year orgasm."

He laughs. But this is no laughing matter. The dead are no longer whispering. They're shouting.

"The dead are saying this -- bring meaning back into life," Hetrick says.

So what gives Hetrick's own life meaning?

Death, of course.

Born into the family funeral home business, death was something he first tried to escape. But the Army, his family and then his chosen field of forensics kept bringing him back to it.

"The irony is I have never been able to escape death," Hetrick says.

Of course, none of us will escape. We all owe a death. But while many go about life trying to forget this fact, Hetrick never forgets. In fact, he embraces it. Skulls, the symbol of death hiding within us all, abound in his office and even inside the autopsy suite. He sports a skull-emblazoned bow-tie.

Most recently, Hetrick has been turning people's fascination with death into his cable TV show, which is soon coming back for a third season on ID channel.

WATCH: Hetrick explains how his real cases become TV episodes

To celebrate the new season of shows, Hetrick and his entire coroner's office staff are hosting a special "murder mystery night" where fans can help solve a make-believe homicide during the Harrisburg Senators' game this Saturday evening. There's even a Graham Hetrick bobble-head give-away.

Who says coroners can't have fun?

"Life is transient," Hetrick says. "If we go with the attitude this is only a limited amount of time I have the grace to live, then you give more value to it. It gives more meaning to a sunset or a walk. It causes you to live more in the moment."

But what of the biggest mystery of all? Namely, what happens when we die?

Hetrick says he believes in a Creator. You can't study the grand design of DNA and dismiss it as random natural selection, he says. And you cannot hold a heart that beat for 104 years and not be spiritually awestruck.

As for what may be awaiting us on the other side, Hetrick prefers eastern religion metaphors of death as "changing clothes" or Apostle Paul's description of life as a tent - a temporary shelter for our soul.

From a man who has stared death in the face all his life, here's Hetrick's take:

What's left behind is just tissue and bone. The spirit that animated it has departed. Not gone. Transformed.

"Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It is transformed," Hetrick says, quoting thermodynamic law. "This is what happens at the moment of death. We will be transformed."

Until that time comes for Hetrick, he'll happily whistle past the graveyard - or in his case, into his county coroner's office each morning.

"Every time I walk in here it says, 'I'm here today. I'm alive.' I always remember that when I walk through these doors," Hetrick says, smiling.

"The best way to live life is to embrace death. That gives it meaning and it's fun. I'm going to have a good death."

WATCH: Hetrick on his life-long relationship with death

Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission.